Visual Review

Karaoke.

I dug what LS did here for the opening. The colors don’t match up with the credits, but I don’t really think they need to. The k-timing and sparkles were a nice touch and the translation was easy to read.

Unfortunately, they didn’t really get the timing on this right, so you have lines flowing into each other, making a jumbled mess of fail. And it’s completely noticeable.

This is what a lack of QC gets you.

Rating: Good. (Yeah, I liked it enough to pretend the timing on the subs wasn’t fucked up.)

I found myself snapping along to the song here. I loved the touch of the rainbow sparkles that comes in as the line starts and then fades away after a few syllables. Nice shit.

But again, there are issues with the timing. And at times the subs hit the credits. How do you not notice this shit?

Rating: Good. (Again, I can forgive the lack of QC for an otherwise excellent kara.)

Typesetting.

Great sub placement.

Other.

Using italics as your overlap text? Well, that’s interesting. I’ve never seen it done before. It makes sense because the italics correspond to the main character’s thoughts while the regular text is for the background argument. Not a bad decision at all.

Okay, never mind. They really didn’t put all that much thought into the overlap issue at all. Have some way to differentiate between who’s speaking, please.

Script Review

Karaoke.

The opening made complete sense and was pretty well written. I enjoyed it. No major issues with the ED, but I did feel it was a bit lacking compared to the OP script.

Main Script.

A relatively literal translation of this common joke, but that’s not such a bad thing. It fits pretty well as-is. Just makes me a bit worried for how they’ll handle later ones.

Cute. I liked this quite a bit.

She says “best place” in Engrish here. My eyes thank you for not transcribing the Engrish.

Edit: Fuck me. Beckett pointed out in the comments that I somehow missed the retardglish here in my hall-skipping joy to see transcripted Engrish avoided. I need to stop reviewing at 2 AM.

Complete gibberish. I watch subs for translations, not shitty guesslations that don’t even make any fucking sense.

Uhh, no. “Call me Muscle.”? Really? Fuck, that’s stupid.

“Who are you calling an idiot? You’re just jealous of my muscles!” <- I don’t really understand what the actual translation of the second sentence in the bottom line is so I just went with something generic. I’m sure LittleSubbers just missed a pun or a joke here with this attempt at a translation.

And another miss. If you aren’t going to sub the jokes, don’t bother to sub the show.

The only people who enjoy untranslated jokes are the most wapanese of all waps, who have managed to brainwash themselves into laughing on-cue at anything they don’t get, and the people who don’t need your subs in the first place.

“She’s supposed to be on duty,” is a better way to phrase that.

Great, great phrasing here.

And another good line. …err, word. Translation. Yeah, there we go. Another good translation.

Nice quality check there.

“The secret” implies there’s only one secret. And it wasn’t “of this world” it was “in this world”, according to the note.

“A secret in this world? What could it be?”

I’m sure excitd to watch the rest of your subs.

Either this line is wrong or you translated the note incorrectly. Either way, it doesn’t jive.

Beautiful.

Very obvious timing mistake. She doesn’t say this line at all.

God dammit.

Have you fuck-ups never heard of “QC”? I mean, holy fucking shit these subs are filled with mistakes.

“such a” isn’t really the right phrase here.

“I was so impressed by that great response, I passed her without thinking.”

You should avoid, avoid repetition.

“Plastic bats tend to be light, so this shouldn’t be an issue.”

“Yes.” is a pretty bad generitranslation. Go with “You’re right!” or something.

and then for the latter line have, “So that must make me Muscles-chan.”

These lines would actually make sense then.

Results

Watchability: Watchable.

Visual grade: B+

Script grade: C

Overall grade: C+

LittleSubbers would be a viable alternative to UTW-Mazui if only they had a QC and translated the jokes in the show. But when it comes to the jokes, they hardly handle any of them with an audience of more than the most devout Japanophiles in mind. I shouldn’t have to understand Japanese or use Google to get the humorous parts in a show.

The comedy doesn’t work and the subs are sprinkled with errors. With that in mind, I can’t recommend this release over UTW-Mazui’s.

27 Comments

Dark_Sage: We’ve chatted about this several times before, but I don’t see a problem with fading lines overlapping in a karaoke. You seem to mention it often in reviews.

Overlaps are fairly trivial, and would be :effort: to manually adjust each line’s lead-in/out time, and is in some cases impossible without removing the lead-in altogether (the example you give has a mere 13cs between the sung lines, thus even a simple fade effect here would appear too abruptly).

The OP was also shifted incorrectly for this episode.

I’d recommend UTW-Mazui over this release myself, as I prefer their localisation. Unfortunately both use honorifics.

euro didn’t want to post so I don’t look like I’m double posting. Well then, I think overlapping is a big fucking deal and that you should just decrease their Visual grade to a fucking FFF because of that. It obviously makes me have seizures every time I try to watch the kara.

“She says “best place” in Engrish here. My eyes thank you for not transcribing the Engrish.”

You’re so thankful they didn’t transcribe the Engrish that you are going to just let them get away with a failure of an English sentence without comment? Line should be “This is my favorite place”, “This my favorite place” sounds like it was written by a 4 year old. A below average 4 year old.

It’s unfortunate that we received such a poor grade.
I bear responsibility for all the timing mistakes as I was still sleeping and Shadow_Wolf was probably rushing through this because I was so delayed.

I have absolutely no idea if this release was QC’d at all, however, I can assure you, our viewers, that Minami_ and Emess? have checked the other eps.

The jokes, however, have been under heavy discussion, and rather than localising it into a half-assed, retarded English counterpart, we decided post a few TL Notes on our blog instead.

On the topic of localisation:
All the people I’ve talked to that watched our release did so precisely because they didn’t like UTW-Mazui’s localisation. Personally, I thought their localisations were mostly okay, but I wanted to provide a more literal alternative. Funny how it’s only other fansubbers that seem to have a problem with it.

Nevertheless, I see your point. I’ll try making the jokes more understandable for future episodes. Episodes 1-3 will be v2’d too.

I really wanted to like this release, but all of the mistakes you mentioned killed it for me. The lack of localized jokes and the way the text overlap was handles. I don’t get why some groups don’t change the color of overlap dialogue. If you’re going to keep them the same color, you could at least {\an8} or something so you can differentiate it better. I’m personally a fan of how Commie moves the positions of overlapping lines towards the characters that speak them.